Acoustic guitar simulator

#1

Hi all,
what do you think is currently the best open source plugin that can be used in Ardour to realistically simulate the sound of an acoustic guitar in a MIDI track?
[Ardour on Linux]
Thank you,
a.

#2

So much of making a virtual guitar sound “real” is in the MIDI programming. There are tons of guitar sample libraries out there, if you have Kontakt I really like the sound of the Orange Tree Samples guitars. There’s probably also some available for Decent Sampler.

#3

Pianoteq has a classical guitar patch which sounds quite good. If you’re using linux, no prob as pianoteq is native - it is pricey though but I think you can try a demo version. Note that pianoteq is not sample based but a model, so the plugin is pretty lightweight. Check for yourself the sound samples on their website:
https://www.modartt.com/guitar
Sample

#4

If you’re looking for something open source, check out the Nylon,Clean, or Steel Guitar (Steel sounds the most realistic) that comes with x42 General MIDI Synth, x42 General MIDI Synth

Then stick a reverb (I am using Gx Verb which part of the Guitarix plugins lv2 bundle:GitHub - brummer10/GxPlugins.lv2: A set of extra lv2 plugins from the guitarix project.) before the fader on the effects chain and I think it sounds pretty good IMO.

#5

Honestly, it would probably be easier, cheaper, faster, and definitely sound more authentic to find some kid who lives nearby and have them play a real guitar for you. Maybe contact a guitar teacher and see if any of his students want a free studio experience.

2 Likes
#6

Also you could use Sfizz with one of these: Guitars - SFZ Instruments

1 Like
#7

This may be a little off-course from what you were requesting, but perhaps we can compare this to using a theoretical hardware synth that takes MIDI and returns excellent guitar performances. In practice, you could use your Linux/Ardour setup, send MIDI to this beast, return audio and have what you want. Fortunately this beast does exist, but unfortunately it is another computer. MIDI from Ardour/Linux to another system that receives MIDI and runs instances of AAS Strum or AmpleSound guitars. I haven’t seen anything from the open source community that comes close to these two. To tackle this you will need to determine if the priority is getting a great guitar track or being exclusively Linux.
h

#8

Here is a small Fingerpicking and strumming example

Load ac-guitar-test.ardour from the unzipped folder.
I used Fluida in this project (on Linux), if you don’t have fluida replace it with a plugin that can load soundfonts and load Acoustic Guitars JNv2.sf2 from the soundfont folder (in the the unzipped folder) into your plugin.